For some reason when trying to set the action attribute on a form field, or anything with the name action for that matter, JQuery doesn’t handle this very well. I believe this has been fixed in newer versions. Currently I am using 1.4.2 where this issue is coming up.

One way to get around this is to use the DOM selector like in some of my previous posts, but using the setAttribute method.

Source code

$('#searchForm').get(0).setAttribute('action', 'myNewValue');